Review: Scream Queen #1

Posted by bob in Comics, Reviews on June 4th, 2008

The mall remains one of the centerpieces in a teenager’s life and has been the setting for horror stories dating back to the first Dawn of the Dead. There’s an entire subculture within any mall, made up of teens from one or more high schools, working at the various shops and congregating in the food court during breaks to gossip, mock, and engage in what passes for witty banter.

As a result, it’s the perfect setting for a slasher story and Scream Queen delivers pretty much what you would expect. The first issue (of five) arrives in comic shops today and introduces us to the stock players from Rumson High: the perverts, the bitches, the nice girl and so on. As written by Brendan Hay (Frank TV), they sound like teens but none of them feel fully realized. You get just enough character color to understand which one most deserves to get whacked.

The whacker, so to speak, is at first the mall’s seemingly sole janitor. A grumpy old man who dispatches messy teens and then returns to his secret hideaway within the mall where he seems to be raising a large, mentally-challenged man-child named Wrighty. From what little is established, it appears Wrighty’s entire worldview is the lash of the belt from his caretaker (father?) and the people glimpsed through a crack in the wall.

All that changes when the janitor dies and Wrighty breaks free, continuing to kill those who dare make a mess. He also has eyes on the sole good girl in the story, killing those that will mock her.

The story moves along breezily but without a single shred of tension or suspense since you know what’s coming and when. The art by Nate Watson is serviceable as he creates a good looking set of teens and a plausible version of a mall where things go awry totally unnoticed by adults (totally missing from the story), security personnel and security cameras.

I’m not sure how Hay will sustain this story for four more months without stretching reader’s credulity and patience. There aren’t enough characters left after one issue to care about other than our heroine and she’s just not enough.